Visual Studio 2010 will have better support for a multi-monitor setup, but it's possible to get part of the way in 2008 already.

Toolbars and property windows (e.g. Solution Explorer, Class View) can be dragged into separate windows (2010 will add the ability to drag documents into separate windows too):

Window positioning gets a bit weird when you switch from one monitor to another, or change resolutions - a common occurrence when you're a laptop user docking and un-docking.

You can create two settings files, one for your single monitor layout, and one for your multi-monitor layout, and use them when starting Visual Studio 2008:

1. Arrange your windows the way you like them
2. Go to Tools > Import and Export Settings > Export selected environment settings
3. You get a great tree-view of every possible setting category in Visual Studio. Click the top node to deselect everything, and scroll down and select only General Settings > Window Layouts:
   
4. Save your settings file somewhere handy (e.g. d:\multimon.vssettings)
5. Repeat for each layout you like

Now you have two or more settings files, you just need to create a shortcut icon for each one somewhere in your start menu.

Edit the target, and add the parameter /resetsettings D:\multimon.vssettings to the end (replace the path with each settings file path).

Now when you launch your new shortcut, it will start Visual Studio 2008 with the correct window layout. Because you only exported and imported the Window Layouts, all the other settings stay the same.

You may also want to make these changes to your shortcut:

• Add the /nosplash parameter to your Target, to avoid the "Visual Studio" splash screen and make it slightly faster to start (perception is everything!)
• Check the Run as administrator option, which is useful if you often need to restart Visual Studio to connect to the ASP.NET worker process when developing under IIS.

Cheers,

Kirk

Previous VS2008 Tips:

• Visual Studio Tips n Tricks (DEV313)
• Visual Studio - Copy references
• Turn off outlining / regions in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio 2008 tip of the day - relive the series
• Explore files from Visual Studio
• Snippet Designer released
• Ctrl + . -- Bring up that annoying smart tag menu
• Temporary Projects - You don't have to save them
• Christchurch - Visual Studio Tips'n'Tricks
• Visual Studio - Regedit your tab ordering and add a column guide

Code Camp is less than two weeks away!

If you want to catch some free sessions on the state-of-the-art in .NET development, SQL Server and developer security then sign up for Code Camp Auckland 2009 now.

Code Camps are non-profit, and organised by members of the local developer community. This year the Auckland Code Camp is the day before TechEd (Sunday 13 September), so we've managed to nab a few great speakers on their day off to present to us.

It's the biggest Code Camp ever - over 14 hours of sessions across 3 streams from 10am till 5pm:

Development...

• What's Happening in .NET Languages and Why Should You Care?
• .NET on the iPhone and Beyond
• Behaviour Driven Development
• Domain Specific Languages
• C# 4.0 new features
• Silverlight with Prism
• Becoming Certified
• Lightning Talks
• and more!

The latest and greatest in development topics, by the people that know!

SQL Server?

• SQL Server Virtualisation Best Practices and Recommendations
• SQL Server Analysis Services and Gemini
• Query Optimization and Query Tuning
• Understanding SQL Server Indexing
• SQL Server Maintenance

Training and guidance from the best SQL trainers in the industry!

Security!

• Secure Development Lifecycle and Threat Modelling workshop
• Secure Coding Practices

We are lucky to have Michael Howard, author of Writing Secure Code and 24 Deadly Sins of Software Security giving a free workshop for developers, architects and team leads on Threat Modelling and the Secure Development Lifecycle. This will be followed by a session on how to write secure .NET code.

Auckland has never seen such an awesome free event!

Presenters that are offering their time include Greg Low, Nicholas Dritsas and Auckland's Alex Henderson of Architecture Chat fame.

To cover the costs of the event, we have the help of our generous sponsors: Microsoft, Datacom, Intergen, INETA and Xero.

All that's left for you to do is to visit the website for more details, and sign up now!

See you there on Sunday 13 September,

Kirk

Today at the Wellington .NET User Group, Kevin presented a talk on "Windows Mobile 6.5 Widgets".

Kevin has kindly provided his slides and samples for download:

I found this interesting. I haven't developed any applications for Windows Mobile, though I have played around a bit with the emulator and deploying code from within Visual Studio.

Widgets seem like a lot simpler application development model than native or compact framework applications. The application development model is similar to Vista sidebar gadgets, as there is a packaged zip file containing the application inside - and the application is 'simply' Javascript and HTML. Widgets can use XHR or DOM manipulation, and have access to a small amount of local storage to store preference information.

Windows Mobile 6.5 treats widgets as first-class application citizens within the OS - they have icons on the revamped start screen, and appear in the uninstall screen. As far as the user knows, they are the same as a native application.

Where the process is currently let down is in deployment and debugging. Currently a widget can only be deployed through the Windows Mobile marketplace, after the developer has signed up and the application has been reviewed (I think!). Debugging from Visual Studio seems non-existent, meaning that development is through trial and error.

I could see an enterprising person (like Kevin) building a Javascript library that simulated the API provided by the widget infrastructure, so that widgets could be developed and tested on a desktop before being deployed on a device. Kevin, am I right that all that is needed is the Widget object and some fake ActiveX controls?

All up, an interesting session.

Cheers!

Kirk

Today I went to Nelson for lunch, and presented on Caching to the Nelson .NET User Group.

The talk was a repeat of my Wellington and Auckland talk from a few months ago, and covered various places you typically cache data in a .NET app, motivating the discussion of memcached and Velocity.

It was nice to get down to Nelson to briefly soak up the sun and meet a few new people.

View my previous post on Caching for further info.

Thanks for having me Daniel!

Kirk

When is it not safe to load an XML file into an XmlDocument object?

Any time the source is untrusted, it turns out:

Tom Hollander: Protecting against XML Entity Expansion attacks

That's one I haven't heard of before, and shows why every input from an untrusted source should be treated with care.

It reminds me of the zip expansion attacks that used to break mail servers 8 or so years ago:

Zip expansion attack. A large uniform file (for example 1 Gbyte of Zeros) is zipped and e-mail. AV or content filtering products attempt to unzip the attachment for checking, but are unable to do so because of lack of disc space. [ecommnet]

The old expanding file trick. What will they think of next?

Kirk

I presented a talk at the Wellington and Auckland .NET user groups this month titled "Best Practices -  Caching". The goal of the talk was to discuss why we might need to add caching to our applications, and the way that we typically add it to each layer:

• Client-side: reducing data flowing to the server, enable caching through expiry etc
• ASP.NET: stashing data; page-level, fragment, IIS caching
• Business layer: cache objects to avoid computation
• Data layer: cache raw data from the database; identity maps
• Database: reduce hits on disk

The difficult part when caching at any layer is invalidating the redundant data that is stored in the cache when the source data changes. It's easier depending on the type of the data:

• Reference - shared reads (e.g. Catalog)
• Easy to cache and distribute
• Activity - exclusive write (e.g. Cart)
• Can cache each user's data separately
• Resource - shared, concurrency read/write, large number of transactions (e.g. Auction bid)
• Caching is hard
• DB is best source of data, with careful caching

The second half of the talk we looked at two caching technologies - memcached and Velocity.

The presentation: Caching.pdf 

Some links:

• Microsoft Project code named Velocity
• Steve Souders - High performance web sites
• YSlow

Kirk